​Life’s thermodynamics

For those interested, this is a premise of how tosolve the main problemby saving money and time: enough time to build your upcoming child's primal health [40]).

Let’s start with a bit of fundamental knowledge in biophysics. The power-seeking tendency of any living object has a thermodynamic origin. So does the employee/employer asymmetry.

How does it work?

Any living organism draws energy – chemical, and also solar when photosynthesis is used – from its environment. Part of this energy is devoted to organic growth, the rest to functional maintenance and activity.

In an abstract but no less real way, human Takers (as opposed to Leavers) [41], also exploit their environment – including the human environment – to gather energy, nowadays mainly as a monetary equivalent. Of this indirect form of energy, part is devoted to their capital growth, the rest to their maintenance and activity. Whether for a person of flesh and bloodor for a huge immortal person[42], the resulting economic power is the monetary equivalent of a thermodynamic dimension characterizing every living entity, which I’ll here term individual power dissipation (IPD).

I have found it helpful to introduce IPD to explain the origin of the strain imposed on the world by Takers, because IPD measures the organism’s grip on its environment. Consider first the evolutionary transition from cold-blooded to warm-blooded animals. It endowed the latter with increased mobility and exploratory skills, improving food gathering efficiency. Similarly, at a later evolutionary stage, significant cerebral developments and new associated skills paralleled an increased efficiency of energy gathering in hominin species, in terms of their daily temporal budget [43]. And quite recently it has been observed that humans' DPI is about 27% higher than that of other primates, the stability of this excess being partly secured by a larger backup "energy tank" as fat [44]. These three examples illustrate that to the excess of energy gathering, as compared to individuals of other species – or of the same species – less able to draw their food energy from a common environment, must correspond an increased energy dissipation: more costly activity, more costly maintenance including that of a larger energy store. With the advent of Homo sapiens, the possibilities of IPD increase were amplified through value-exchange processes (and, finally, money). Takers’ capital, the equivalent of an energy store, soon allowed them to initiate a practically unlimited progression of their discovery, acquisition and exploitation/dissipation of global natural resources, necessarily absorbing part of their fellow-creatures’ IPD.

With the progressive disappearance of capital growth hindrances since the end of the seventies, as well as through modifications of the nature and ways to use the capital, IPD inequality between Takers and other humans has reached unprecedented heights. The very selective planetary distribution of this capital and its inherent IPD are responsible for two plagues. The main one is the economic destitution of a large part of humanity and the other is the dramatic increase, over the last thirty-five years, of societal stress in developed countries.

These plagues wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the extraordinary ability of humans to adapt to the living conditions imposed on them by the greed of a minority. This remains true even in liberal-democratic societies, especially in a time when inter-individual relationships have become weaker and weaker because of living and consumer habits promoting solitude and resignation [45]. While vigorous reactions have occurred in the past, such as for example the auto-industry sit-down battles of the mid-thirties in the USA [24], or various general strikes and attempted revolutions in the industrial world, or more recently many non-violent protests against the established order [46] and its faceless, ubiquitous “mediocracy” [47], most of these were exceptions.​The amplification mechanism of Takers’ capital-bound IPD is simple. Whether these are persons of flesh and blood or huge immortal persons, their economic power feeds on the sum of the IPD shares which flow into their “account” from all environmental resources, of which their employees are part. As far as human resources are concerned, these IPD shares are the exact equivalent of the monetary surplus value as defined by Marx. In any production chain, these are provided by a potentially unlimited number of employees, each at work in their own domain of expertise: from mining to the transportation and purification of raw materials; from soil cultivation and crop harvesting to food processing, distribution and sale; from various building activities and the production of goods to promotion and sale; from recycling the excess of food to the destruction of surplus goods and refuse disposal; from the legitimation, organization and reinforcement of the whole chain to the “optimization” of employees’ working hours and wages, employers’ income-tax payments, etc. So much for the so-called real economy, whose financial emancipation is now creating fictitious capital based on anticipated exploitation of common resources and on future production capacity [48]. The risk inherent in this latter invention lies in sudden meltdowns of the fictitious capital, the immediately visible consequences of which have until now been limited thanks to bank bailout operations. These, however, because of the lessening of tax-rate increases as a function of income, are made at the expense of the community and to the advantage of huge immortal persons. Until when?